The theoretical framework of this study is based on the prevalent debate of whether prosodic processing is influenced by higher level linguistic-specific circuits or reflects lower level encoding of physical properties. Using the dichotic listening technique, the study investigates the hemispheric processing of Japanese pitch accent by native…

What are the effects of experience on subsequent learning? We explored the effects of language-specific word order knowledge on the acquisition of sequential conditional information. Korean and English adults were engaged in a sequence learning task involving three different sets of stimuli: auditory linguistic (nonsense syllables), visual…

Spanish-English bilingual lexical organization was investigated using masked cognate and non-cognate priming with the lexical decision task. In Experiment 1, three groups of bilinguals (Spanish dominant, English dominant and Balanced) and a single group of beginning bilinguals (Spanish) were tested with Spanish and English targets primed by…

Purpose: The present study was designed to investigate what linguistic variables best predict bilingual recognition of acoustically degraded sentences and how to identify bilingual individuals who might have more difficulty than their monolingual counterparts on such tasks. Method: Four hundred English speech-perception-in-noise (SPIN) sentences…

Could a second language (L2) influence how bilinguals process their native language (L1)? The work described in this dissertation examined this issue focusing on the way bilinguals interpret the meanings of words. Capitalizing on the prevalence of words that can be translated in more than one way across languages (i.e., "translation ambiguity,"…

Studies of spoken and signed language processing reliably show involvement of the posterior superior temporal cortex. This region is also reliably activated by observation of meaningless oral and manual actions. In this study we directly compared the extent to which activation in posterior superior temporal cortex is modulated by linguistic…